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X Prize Sets First-Round Cuts

FOCUSED The West Philly Hybrid X team goes to the next round.Credit
Tim Shaffer/Reuters

A handful of professed graybeard engineers trying to improve the reliability and efficiency of their electric sports car. An international company based in India with intentions of raising its profile in the American market. West Coast entrepreneurs looking to change the world. And a group of inner-city high school students competing on a world stage.

These are just a few of the teams that have made it through the first round of cuts in the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize competition. The surviving teams, to be announced Monday in New York, will advance to the next round of the X Prize, the quest to build a 100 mile-a-gallon vehicle that is feasible for mass production.

The welter of entrants may be worthy of a modern-day “Around the World in 80 Days” saga, but the contest is serious business. For the X Prize Foundation, creator of the competition, the goal is to encourage radical technology breakthroughs that benefit humanity. The nonprofit group is best known for the 2004 Ansari X Prize competition in which Burt Rutan, backed by Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, won the $10 million purse for building and flying the world’s first private craft into space.

For Progressive Insurance, which has put up the prize money, it is a chance not only to gain some green street cred, but also to promote vehicle safety, one of many requirements that all entries must meet.

To make it to this point in the multistage contest, entrants had to prove to a seven-member panel of automotive experts that their vehicles would not only be ready in time for track tests and races this spring, but also provide business plans showing that their vehicles were feasible for mass production.

Only about half of the original 97 entrants will make Monday’s cut. Those who have made it through the initial design round include giant carmakers like Tata Motors, owner of Jaguar and Land Rover, as well as darlings of Silicon Valley like Aptera, backed by investors like Google and IdeaLab, and Tesla.

Smaller outfits are also in the fray. Amp Motor Works, a Cincinnati-based company that is taking orders for gasoline cars converted to electricity, will be racing a battery-powered Saturn Sky. The staff of another team that made it to the second round, Optamotive, is a group of engineers, mostly Canadian, who have been working in their spare time to build a three-wheeler that can go from 0 to 60 miles an hour in less than 4 seconds.

However, the real underdog in this eco-conscious, high-tech version of “American Idol” may turn out to be a group whose core is made up of a dozen students from West Philadelphia High School. The West Philly Hybrid X Team is entering two vehicles, a converted Ford Focus that uses a parallel plug-in hybrid design, and a racy-looking biodiesel hybrid sports car based on a chassis from Factory Five, a company that makes replicas of classics like the Shelby Cobra.

Under the leadership of Simon Hauger, a former math and science teacher, the team has been working on the X Prize project since early 2008 and has raised about $300,000 of its estimated $400,000 budget. The team also relies on contributions of equipment and technology — it has even made use of donated time in Boeing’s wind tunnel outside Philadelphia.

While the students have each put in an average of 10 hours a week into the project since it began, none of them is old enough to drive the cars being built.

“The insurance states you have to be 25 to drive the car in the race,” said Jacques Wells, a 17-year-old senior, underlining the fact that this is no soapbox derby. The team draws a lot of technical and financial support from a variety of sources. Supporters include a professor and a graduate student from Drexel University in Philadelphia, who are helping to design the complex computer control systems necessary to run a hybrid vehicle.

On the other hand, the students are involved in all aspects of the competition, which includes designing and building the vehicles, business planning, advertising, public relations and Web site development. More important, participating in the X Prize contest has presented opportunities rarely afforded kids from an urban neighborhood, said Azeem Hill, a 16-year-old junior.

“It’s really had a positive impact on my life,” Mr. Hill said. “I even gave a speech on education to the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C.”

Does the West Philly team really have a chance of winning the X Prize? Perhaps the strongest argument in its favor is that it has one of the best track records of any entrant. West Philly won the Tour de Sol alternative-fuel-vehicle contest in 2005 and 2006.

“The most exciting part for me,” said Mr. Wells, “is when we’re out there really competing, knowing that we’re only a high school team and the other teams are multimillion-dollar organizations.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 18, 2009, on Page AU4 of the New York edition with the headline: X Prize Sets First-Round Cuts. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe